Hi all. I am a community worker with young people, and a social work educator, and an academic student. I’ve been using OF for task management for all these 3 roles for about the last 5 years. It works best for the academic stuff.
I’m starting to find that OF is getting in the way of my social and education work. OF seems to work extremely well for projects that have easily articulated tasks, but less so for work like mine in which the ‘task’ is people.
Does anyone else work in the ‘human services’ field? Anyone found a way around this? I’m keen to know if there are ways of using OF which would increase its effectiveness for work like mine.
Dave,
Have you explored OF’s Contexts - a concept straight out of the GTD philosophy?
If you read threads here discussing whether/when/how to use contexts, you may well find that there are as many ways to use/uses of Contexts as there are users posting about them.
Also that there is no real consensus except that a Context is a tool/circumstance/requirement/location/resource needed in order to accomplish something.
And that they are a flexible aspect of software like OF, easily adaptable to many individual ways of working.
So maybe you could co-opt Contexts to represent or arrange your work with people. Good luck!
Thanks Mark!
Yes, I use Contexts in OF a lot. Usually in my work I allocate a location for ‘people-related’ tasks.
I think I need to think further on what the actual problem is: I’m not that it’s OF, or my way of entering tasks into OF.
Dave,
Have you tried ‘assigning’ each person you work with to one (unique) Contact - or vice versa depending on how you look at it/them?
That way you’d be able to filter by person etc…
You may require multiple Contexts in any one ‘Project’, though. Good luck!
